Fortunately, this reflection will be very short one, compared to the last one ;).
On Thursday, we met in a computer lab, 155b at 10:30.
Sang-Ki, David and Bo-sun led the whole lab session, helping us to create a new page where we could upload our own bibliography for research paper and make a link between the page and the home.
First, we made a list of each classmate’s intriguing research topic on a main page as the following:
References
Indirect error correction and its effect on grammar in L2 writing
Peer feedback (Oral)
Relative effectiveness of prompts versus recasts in classroom
Repair in CA
Error feedback in L2 writing: Focusing on vocabulary
Learnability in SLA and overpassivization errors
How different interactional feedback lead to L2 development
Role of noticing in interactional feedback
Implicit error correction and CALL
Relationship between recast and learner's response
Reponses to different types of recasts and L2 development
Then, each classmate created his/her own page with the title that indicates the topic of their references and made links to the home.
In a new page, each person wrote a sentence like “This list of references initially posted by…” as Dr. Ortega suggested. Then, we uploaded our bibliographies. At that time, we encountered one technical problem. That is, several of us brought the bibliographies in a word file by using removable disks. When we copied the bibliographies and pasted them, the word formats were destroyed and we had to rework on it. Some of our classmates kept asking “What did you do?” as they encountered unexpected outcome. It’s because some classmates said that when two or more people work on the site together, that kind of accidents might occur. As a result, the format of each classmate’s bibliography is not uniform. Maybe we should work on it more. That’s all we actually did.
Thank you for your help, Sang-ki, David and Bosun.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Reflection on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 by Yun Deok Choi
Truscott, J. (1999). What’s wrong with oral grammar correction. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 55, 437-456.
Lyster, R., Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (1999) A response to Truscott’s ‘What’s wrong with oral grammar correction.’ The Canadian Modern Language Review, 55, 457-467.
At the beginning of the class, we started the lesson by appointing each classmate to a certain week when he/she would make a reflection on classroom activities. After deciding that, we moved on to talking about Truscott who is the author of the article “What’s wrong with oral grammar correction.” At first, Dr. Ortega asked Hung-Tzu about his background or career since she had taken his English class in Taiwan. According to Dr. Ortega and Hung-Tzu, John Truscott is originally from USA and has stayed in Taiwan for over ten years. Recently he has interested in cognitive perspective like working memory and wrote an article on meta-analysis on L2 writing which will be published within this year. In addition, he published a couple of articles with Michael Sharwood Smith on interlanguage development. He also wrote some articles on error correction against L2 writing and noticing, aside from the present article.
Before group discussion of the two articles, Dr. Ortega pointed out that Truschott takes the theoretical position of Krashen and Universal Grammar toward SLA in the article, with some explanations on Krashen and his academic point of view in SLA.
For about 10 minutes we exchanged our impressions and thoughts about Truscott (1999)’s article and the responding article by Lyster, Lightbown, and Spada (1999) in small groups, with the goal of formulating meaningful research questions based on the two articles. During whole class discussion, several students presented their own positions whether they agreed with Truscott or Lyster et al. At first, Kevin said that he could not completely agree with either article. Sorin agreed with Truscott’s assertion to some extent from a teacher’s perspective, but she was cautious of his extreme all-or-nothing position against error correction. Besides, Yun Deok agreed with Truscott’s concern about affective aspects in terms of excessive error correction. On the other hand, Myunghi stated that she is in favor of error correction by mentioning her Japanese class in which the teacher always provided correction and she had learned a lot.
Dr. Ortega indicated “Affective” versus “Effective” issues with regard to the article and she stated that Truscott claimed that error correction is not effective and harmful for learners to learn a language. In terms of effectiveness of error correction, Dan mentioned feasibility of research on error correction. Then, Yuki touched upon how we should think about error correction with relation to educational purposes and contextual factors, especially in terms of critical pedagogy.
We criticized Truscott’s confusing and contradictory assertion that he confined error correction to grammar by saying that “a similar case could be made for other types of errors (e.g., in pragmatics or pronunciation” and at the end he suddenly changed his remarks into “the issues involved in correction of errors in pragmatics or pronunciation, for example, differ in some respect in some respects from those I have considered here, so my conclusion should not be casually extended to those areas.” As for his antipodal position, David mentioned that it might have something to do with the process of editing the article. ;)
With respect to his contradictory position, Kevin pointed out the term,“Consistency.” To be more specific, Kevin was wondering if teachers provide consistent correction, is correction effective? Ping also criticized Truscott’s assertion that error correction which is appropriate for one student might not proper for other students by mentioning that individual learner variables. Dr. Ortega also expressed sharp criticism of his unreasonably continuous assertions and brief mention of relative studies for his own sake. She also put her finger on that what Truscott called negotiation of form refers to both explicit error correction and explanation as Sang-ki referred to implicitness and explicitness of error correction with respect to Truscott’s point of view.
With respect to the studies that Truscott mentioned in the article, Dr. Ortega explained Robert’s study which is included in a book (1995) edited by Dick Schmidt. His study is about 5 learners of Japanese L2 and he video taped while a teacher delivered a lecture. Then he asked the learners about what kind of errors they made and what they knew about the errors when a teacher corrected their errors while they were watching the one-hour video tape. The findings of the study are students could not figure out any error correction and what the error correction was about. According to the teacher, it is very earlier study which investigated whether students noticed error correction and understood it. Mackey, Gass & McDonough (2000)’s article in SSLA and Carpenter, MacGregor, & Mackey (2006)’s article in SSLA are very similar to the study in terms of their topic and research method. From this perspective, Dr. Ortega posed a question: Do students have to notice error correction and understand the nature of the correction in order to benefit from it? In order to answer the question, she cited Dick Schmidt’s remark: noticing is necessary but understanding is not necessary.
In this vein, she mentioned “emergentism” and I consulted Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics (2002) in order to find the exact definition of the term. I hope this will help you to understand what it means. According to the dictionary, “emergentism” refers to the view that higher forms of cognition emerge from the interaction between simpler forms of cognition and the architecture of the human brain. For example, in language acquisition, it has been proposed that categories such as the parts of speech are not innate but emerge as a result of the processing of input by the perceptual systems (cited from Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p177). This point of view leads to studies like McDonough (2006)’s interaction and syntactic priming.
We also talked about Dekeyser (1993)’s study which was mentioned by Truscott. Dekeyser picked up several classes and compared them for whole semester or a year. Dr. Ortega stated that it is a very pioneering study because it first examined error correction in conjunction with motivation.
After explaining above mentioned articles, she also tried to think about whether error correction
should be done across all aspects of language or it should be done on one specific area at a time
from the perspectives of teachers?
We dealt with this question in terms of the following aspects:
-simple vs. complex
-core vs. peripheral
-ready vs. unready
Besides, she also posed the following question: Should we correct any errors whenever they
occur? Or should we make a plan for providing correction for specific aspect of language in
advance? And she stated that it depends on which position we are taking. If we are believers of
“incidental, reactive, on the fly” types of correction, we provide more immediate correction. On
the other hand, if we are believers of “metalinguistic process(understanding),” we provide
delayed correction.
She also explained that, in terms of corrections on written or oral production, writing studies
like Studies like Ferris (1999, 2002, 2004) and Hyland (2006), error correction was provided in
response to more general, overall aspects of language, except for Sheen(2006)’s study. On the
contrary, oral studies like Doughty and Varela (1998), error correction was provided in response
to a specific language structure.
As for the question: How to select errors to be corrected?
In order to answer the question she cited Mike Long’s suggestion. He suggested that we should
consider the following factors:
-useful
-remediable
-pervasive
From this perspective, she also advised us that we should make a decision whether we would deal with overall error correction or concrete error correction when we design our own research.
She also added that if we would concentrate on a certain area, we should gather information what we know about that area. For example, if we want to investigate English morpheme, we should know that learners acquire past tense “-ed” first and then they acquire third person singular pronoun.
At last, Dr. Ortega refuted Truscott’s criticism on Doughty and Varela (1998)’s coding scheme. He critiqued their study did not consider learners’ overuse of target forms; however, as we carefully analyzed their coding scheme together, we found that overuse clearly was embedded in the scheme. Dr. Ortega praised the scheme for its interlanguage sensitive quality and their task essential properties, which means the task provides a lot of obligatory contexts where learners should use target forms. In addition, she advised us that we should have knowledge on a selected form and also come up with this kind of well-designed, feasible coding system when we do our own research and we should concentrate on a couple of target forms rather than a single target.
As for suggestions for Wiki, she advised us to write a couple of definitions of error correction
from today’s articles on the web. And feel free to use it as our own notebooks.
On Thursday, we should go to computer lab and work on Wiki project since Dr. Ortega will go to Japan in order to attend a conference. Plus, we should also upload bibliography on Wiki by Thursday. We will not have any classes for next week due to TBLT conference.
Lyster, R., Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (1999) A response to Truscott’s ‘What’s wrong with oral grammar correction.’ The Canadian Modern Language Review, 55, 457-467.
At the beginning of the class, we started the lesson by appointing each classmate to a certain week when he/she would make a reflection on classroom activities. After deciding that, we moved on to talking about Truscott who is the author of the article “What’s wrong with oral grammar correction.” At first, Dr. Ortega asked Hung-Tzu about his background or career since she had taken his English class in Taiwan. According to Dr. Ortega and Hung-Tzu, John Truscott is originally from USA and has stayed in Taiwan for over ten years. Recently he has interested in cognitive perspective like working memory and wrote an article on meta-analysis on L2 writing which will be published within this year. In addition, he published a couple of articles with Michael Sharwood Smith on interlanguage development. He also wrote some articles on error correction against L2 writing and noticing, aside from the present article.
Before group discussion of the two articles, Dr. Ortega pointed out that Truschott takes the theoretical position of Krashen and Universal Grammar toward SLA in the article, with some explanations on Krashen and his academic point of view in SLA.
For about 10 minutes we exchanged our impressions and thoughts about Truscott (1999)’s article and the responding article by Lyster, Lightbown, and Spada (1999) in small groups, with the goal of formulating meaningful research questions based on the two articles. During whole class discussion, several students presented their own positions whether they agreed with Truscott or Lyster et al. At first, Kevin said that he could not completely agree with either article. Sorin agreed with Truscott’s assertion to some extent from a teacher’s perspective, but she was cautious of his extreme all-or-nothing position against error correction. Besides, Yun Deok agreed with Truscott’s concern about affective aspects in terms of excessive error correction. On the other hand, Myunghi stated that she is in favor of error correction by mentioning her Japanese class in which the teacher always provided correction and she had learned a lot.
Dr. Ortega indicated “Affective” versus “Effective” issues with regard to the article and she stated that Truscott claimed that error correction is not effective and harmful for learners to learn a language. In terms of effectiveness of error correction, Dan mentioned feasibility of research on error correction. Then, Yuki touched upon how we should think about error correction with relation to educational purposes and contextual factors, especially in terms of critical pedagogy.
We criticized Truscott’s confusing and contradictory assertion that he confined error correction to grammar by saying that “a similar case could be made for other types of errors (e.g., in pragmatics or pronunciation” and at the end he suddenly changed his remarks into “the issues involved in correction of errors in pragmatics or pronunciation, for example, differ in some respect in some respects from those I have considered here, so my conclusion should not be casually extended to those areas.” As for his antipodal position, David mentioned that it might have something to do with the process of editing the article. ;)
With respect to his contradictory position, Kevin pointed out the term,“Consistency.” To be more specific, Kevin was wondering if teachers provide consistent correction, is correction effective? Ping also criticized Truscott’s assertion that error correction which is appropriate for one student might not proper for other students by mentioning that individual learner variables. Dr. Ortega also expressed sharp criticism of his unreasonably continuous assertions and brief mention of relative studies for his own sake. She also put her finger on that what Truscott called negotiation of form refers to both explicit error correction and explanation as Sang-ki referred to implicitness and explicitness of error correction with respect to Truscott’s point of view.
With respect to the studies that Truscott mentioned in the article, Dr. Ortega explained Robert’s study which is included in a book (1995) edited by Dick Schmidt. His study is about 5 learners of Japanese L2 and he video taped while a teacher delivered a lecture. Then he asked the learners about what kind of errors they made and what they knew about the errors when a teacher corrected their errors while they were watching the one-hour video tape. The findings of the study are students could not figure out any error correction and what the error correction was about. According to the teacher, it is very earlier study which investigated whether students noticed error correction and understood it. Mackey, Gass & McDonough (2000)’s article in SSLA and Carpenter, MacGregor, & Mackey (2006)’s article in SSLA are very similar to the study in terms of their topic and research method. From this perspective, Dr. Ortega posed a question: Do students have to notice error correction and understand the nature of the correction in order to benefit from it? In order to answer the question, she cited Dick Schmidt’s remark: noticing is necessary but understanding is not necessary.
In this vein, she mentioned “emergentism” and I consulted Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics (2002) in order to find the exact definition of the term. I hope this will help you to understand what it means. According to the dictionary, “emergentism” refers to the view that higher forms of cognition emerge from the interaction between simpler forms of cognition and the architecture of the human brain. For example, in language acquisition, it has been proposed that categories such as the parts of speech are not innate but emerge as a result of the processing of input by the perceptual systems (cited from Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p177). This point of view leads to studies like McDonough (2006)’s interaction and syntactic priming.
We also talked about Dekeyser (1993)’s study which was mentioned by Truscott. Dekeyser picked up several classes and compared them for whole semester or a year. Dr. Ortega stated that it is a very pioneering study because it first examined error correction in conjunction with motivation.
After explaining above mentioned articles, she also tried to think about whether error correction
should be done across all aspects of language or it should be done on one specific area at a time
from the perspectives of teachers?
We dealt with this question in terms of the following aspects:
-simple vs. complex
-core vs. peripheral
-ready vs. unready
Besides, she also posed the following question: Should we correct any errors whenever they
occur? Or should we make a plan for providing correction for specific aspect of language in
advance? And she stated that it depends on which position we are taking. If we are believers of
“incidental, reactive, on the fly” types of correction, we provide more immediate correction. On
the other hand, if we are believers of “metalinguistic process(understanding),” we provide
delayed correction.
She also explained that, in terms of corrections on written or oral production, writing studies
like Studies like Ferris (1999, 2002, 2004) and Hyland (2006), error correction was provided in
response to more general, overall aspects of language, except for Sheen(2006)’s study. On the
contrary, oral studies like Doughty and Varela (1998), error correction was provided in response
to a specific language structure.
As for the question: How to select errors to be corrected?
In order to answer the question she cited Mike Long’s suggestion. He suggested that we should
consider the following factors:
-useful
-remediable
-pervasive
From this perspective, she also advised us that we should make a decision whether we would deal with overall error correction or concrete error correction when we design our own research.
She also added that if we would concentrate on a certain area, we should gather information what we know about that area. For example, if we want to investigate English morpheme, we should know that learners acquire past tense “-ed” first and then they acquire third person singular pronoun.
At last, Dr. Ortega refuted Truscott’s criticism on Doughty and Varela (1998)’s coding scheme. He critiqued their study did not consider learners’ overuse of target forms; however, as we carefully analyzed their coding scheme together, we found that overuse clearly was embedded in the scheme. Dr. Ortega praised the scheme for its interlanguage sensitive quality and their task essential properties, which means the task provides a lot of obligatory contexts where learners should use target forms. In addition, she advised us that we should have knowledge on a selected form and also come up with this kind of well-designed, feasible coding system when we do our own research and we should concentrate on a couple of target forms rather than a single target.
As for suggestions for Wiki, she advised us to write a couple of definitions of error correction
from today’s articles on the web. And feel free to use it as our own notebooks.
On Thursday, we should go to computer lab and work on Wiki project since Dr. Ortega will go to Japan in order to attend a conference. Plus, we should also upload bibliography on Wiki by Thursday. We will not have any classes for next week due to TBLT conference.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Commentary Tues, September 4th, 2007 (Y. Watanabe)
For the rest of the class, we were engaged in mini error correction task. We first listed types of teacher written feedback on students’ writing and the types of error analysis in research. The following categories were identified.
Teacher
Types of feedback:
- direct feedback (making correction with/without explanation)
- indirect feedback (marking the location and/or type/nature of the error, clarification request)
- metalinguistic feedback (explanation of the error)
Modes and manner of feedback:
- conferencing, peer response
- paper vs. electronic
Researcher
- Overall accuracy (nature of the error, all error noteworthy of focus)
- Specific error:
- article
- verb morphology (tense, aspect, subject agreement)
- preposition
The class was divided into six groups taking the role either as a teacher (direct FB and indirect FB group) or as a researcher (overall accuracy, article error, verb morphology error, and preposition error group) to analyze the error of a students’ writing sample. In a group, we identified errors and discussed the difficulty of providing or analyzing the errors. Summarized below are the key takeaways from the discussion:
- It’s difficult as a teacher to provide feedback without knowing what stage of draft the writing is, the learning objectives, and learners’ proficiency and background.
- Form vs. content
- Making a distinction between lexical and grammar error.
- Distinguishing local versus global error. - Different teachers focused on different errors (very erratic).
- Knowledge about the content of the writing (e.g., history in our writing sample) may be
- Uniformity of coding. People use different coding system.
- Where does the error begin and end?
- How can you clearly classify errors? (difficulty of form versus content)
- It’s difficult to determine what the nature of the error is. What do you do with idiomatic errors that are grammatically correct?
- It will be hard to determine the overall accuracy for intermediate level students’ writing. As the learners’ sentences become more complex, the more difficult to define what the nature of the error is.
For next Tuesday:
Read Truscott (1999) and Lyster et al.’s (1999) commentary.
Reminder for next Tuesday:
“Verb morphology error group” needs to give a short summary on the tense errors (past perfect).
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Commentary on Sep. 6
Thursday: meet at PC lab and work on wiki
We first googled "second language acquisition" and logged on to the wikipedia's SLA page.
David: Please take a look at how it is structured. Browse the wikipedia page. See what's included/missing/all the info out there.
Sangki: I'm going to show you how to edit infomation and use page history.
That went on for a few minutes as Sangi explained how it worked.
Next, we went to SLS 750 wiki homepage. there was nothing...we had to do SOMETHING with it.
Sangki taught us how to make a new page, create a link, make an external link, and then link everything together. After the lesson, we gave it a try and played with it for 10 minutes.
Then, we started creating the first page for our wiki. Brainstorming for table of contents took quite a while. Here's the list we came up with:
1. Definition of error feedback
2. Types of error feedback
oral vs. written
teacher vs. learner-initiated
implicit vs. explicit
feedback on form vs. content
feedback on oral vs. written language
offline vs. online
intensive vs. extensive
reactive vs. preactive
group ve. individualized
(David was busy typing everything in.)
It's when we were about to make the third one that we started having trouble with bullets, numbers, all that stuff. We decided to clean it up at another time.
We went back to the first one on the list: definition of error feedback, trying to create a page for it. Here's what we wrote:
Error feedback is a reaction to students' interlanguage performance.
Then, Sangki suggested everyone edit the page, add their own information to it, and make new pages, just to see what happened when people were editing it simultaneously. That kept us busy for 5 minutes. Sangki walked around and asked us NOT to change the main page.
Final goal of the day: create a new page, make a link, and save it.
Thank Sangki and David for go over the basics with us.
Now you can check out our wiki website and add your comments!
We first googled "second language acquisition" and logged on to the wikipedia's SLA page.
David: Please take a look at how it is structured. Browse the wikipedia page. See what's included/missing/all the info out there.
Sangki: I'm going to show you how to edit infomation and use page history.
That went on for a few minutes as Sangi explained how it worked.
Next, we went to SLS 750 wiki homepage. there was nothing...we had to do SOMETHING with it.
Sangki taught us how to make a new page, create a link, make an external link, and then link everything together. After the lesson, we gave it a try and played with it for 10 minutes.
Then, we started creating the first page for our wiki. Brainstorming for table of contents took quite a while. Here's the list we came up with:
1. Definition of error feedback
2. Types of error feedback
oral vs. written
teacher vs. learner-initiated
implicit vs. explicit
feedback on form vs. content
feedback on oral vs. written language
offline vs. online
intensive vs. extensive
reactive vs. preactive
group ve. individualized
(David was busy typing everything in.)
It's when we were about to make the third one that we started having trouble with bullets, numbers, all that stuff. We decided to clean it up at another time.
We went back to the first one on the list: definition of error feedback, trying to create a page for it. Here's what we wrote:
Error feedback is a reaction to students' interlanguage performance.
Then, Sangki suggested everyone edit the page, add their own information to it, and make new pages, just to see what happened when people were editing it simultaneously. That kept us busy for 5 minutes. Sangki walked around and asked us NOT to change the main page.
Final goal of the day: create a new page, make a link, and save it.
Thank Sangki and David for go over the basics with us.
Now you can check out our wiki website and add your comments!
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Yongyan & Flowerdew (2007): Reviewed by Y. Watanabe
Yongyan, L., & Flowerdew, J. (2007). Shaping Chinese
novice scientists' manuscripts for publication. Journal of Second
Language Writing, 16, 100-117.
Li, Y. –Y (2007). Apprentice scholarly writing in a community of practice: An “intraview” of an NNES graduate student writing a research article. TESOL Quarterly, 41, 55-79.
novice scientists' manuscripts for publication. Journal of Second
Language Writing, 16, 100-117.
Error correction in writing does not just happen in language classrooms but also outside the language classroom, for example, when attempting to publish research article in international journals. According to Li (2005, as cited in Yongyan & Flowerdew, 2007), many Chinese doctoral students in science programs are under pressure to publish papers in journals indexed by Science Citation Index, which are international journals predominantly published in English.
When publishing a research article, various stakeholders interact in shaping the manuscript, thus the written product in the journal is often considered as co-constructed artifact. Yongyan and Flowerdew (2007) uncover the roles of the supervisors, peers, and language professionals in 12 Chinese (English as additional language) doctoral science students’ experience submitting and publishing research articles in English. Interviews, emails, and weblogs were utilized to collect doctoral students’ perceptions of feedback from their supervisors, peers, and language professionals, as well as the supervisors’ view on the type of feedback they provide. The researchers found that although doctoral students prefer native English speakers’ feedback, due to economical and accessibility reasons, local experienced English as additional language scientists are the predominant shapers of doctoral students’ manuscripts. The study suggests that there is a need for partnership between English as academic purpose professionals and Chinese-native scientists who have experience publishing in international journals, in order to facilitate the local scholarly community.
I chose this article since my colleagues and I recently submitted manuscripts to international journals, and was curious how other junior scholars perceive, incorporate, and/or reject feedback from peers and other senior scholars. Since submitting a manuscript to a journal is a high-stake task, I am particularly interested in how junior scholars negotiate their writing with the local reviewers (supervisors, peers, etc.) and the gate keepers of the journal (the editors and the manuscript reviewers) and how they gradually acculturate into the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) of their discipline.
To my view, Yongyan and Flowerdew did not fully summarize and present the data in a convincing manner. Their interview questions in the Appendix had much more than what they have summarized and concluded. For this reason, I would not recommend this article to review in class, but there are few studies they have mentioned in their study that include more in-depth data. By quickly reviewing the reference list and reviewing the abstract of the cited articles, the following articles may be of interest to some of you who are looking at how novice writers gain access to (and enter) academic disciplinary literacy practices.
Li, Y. –Y (2007). Apprentice scholarly writing in a community of practice: An “intraview” of an NNES graduate student writing a research article. TESOL Quarterly, 41, 55-79.
Li, Y. –Y (2006). Netotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 159-178.
Heift, feedback in CALL, and 'uptake'
Heift, T. (2004). Corrective feedback and learner uptake in CALL. ReCALL, 16, 416-431.
Being that this study was conducted several years ago, it's aim at the time was to help fill the gap in (the dearth of) research on corrective feedback and CALL (computer-assisted language learning). Participants (177 beginning, high-beginning, and intermediate students of German at three Canadian universities) engaged in online grammar activities that supplemented their regular class sessions over the duration of one semester. The online exercises involved three types of feedback: metalinguistic, metalinguistic + highlighting (of the error), and repetition + highlighting. (This last category is a little vague, since 'repetition' is actually a broad category prompt, such as "grammar", which helps students identify the type of error they committed.)
The goal of the study is to discover which type of feedback leads to higher instances of uptake, here defined as any attempt by a student to correct his or her mistake. (Note that students always had the option to skip ahead to the next exercise without making any correction whatsoever.) Results show that the metalinguistic + highlighting is "most effective at eliciting learner uptake", though not in a statistically significant way. Additionally, the two learner variables of student gender and language proficiency did not have a significant effect on the results.
OK, now that that's out of the way. This was an interesting study to read, personally, as I'm also fiddling around in this very same area. The organization of the article was clear and the statistics and charts all very comprehendable. What raises my hackles, though, is the central question this article is asking. While there is value in showing that students prefer or attend to one type of feedback over another (and only three types of feedback were studied here), in the end I wind up asking myself, "So what?" — especially when the definition of "uptake" means merely attempting to correct a mistake when the computer is telling you, 'Hey, you made mistake.'
Personally, I wanted to see what kind of long-term uptake occurred, but that was not of immediate interest to the researcher. I also kept asking myself what the value of being told 'you made a mistake with the past participle' is when students aren't asked to do anything further with that mistake other than type in something else and have the computer check the answer. Sure, it beats what is possible in a workbook, but I'm skeptical of how much real uptake is happening here. I would have much preferred to see how this kind of explicit feedback stacks up against an implicit variety where students have to judge whether the meaning of what they've said/written is interpreted by a 'listener' as what they meant to say. Hey, wait a minute: that sounds an awful lot like what I've been tinkering with myself... I just have little faith that rewriting a word because you've been told the form is wrong leads to anything substantial in the way of SLA. I may be wrong.
Should we read this for class? Probably not. It was good for me and what I'm studying, but it doesn't have a lot of class-wide appeal, I'm guessing.
Being that this study was conducted several years ago, it's aim at the time was to help fill the gap in (the dearth of) research on corrective feedback and CALL (computer-assisted language learning). Participants (177 beginning, high-beginning, and intermediate students of German at three Canadian universities) engaged in online grammar activities that supplemented their regular class sessions over the duration of one semester. The online exercises involved three types of feedback: metalinguistic, metalinguistic + highlighting (of the error), and repetition + highlighting. (This last category is a little vague, since 'repetition' is actually a broad category prompt, such as "grammar", which helps students identify the type of error they committed.)
The goal of the study is to discover which type of feedback leads to higher instances of uptake, here defined as any attempt by a student to correct his or her mistake. (Note that students always had the option to skip ahead to the next exercise without making any correction whatsoever.) Results show that the metalinguistic + highlighting is "most effective at eliciting learner uptake", though not in a statistically significant way. Additionally, the two learner variables of student gender and language proficiency did not have a significant effect on the results.
OK, now that that's out of the way. This was an interesting study to read, personally, as I'm also fiddling around in this very same area. The organization of the article was clear and the statistics and charts all very comprehendable. What raises my hackles, though, is the central question this article is asking. While there is value in showing that students prefer or attend to one type of feedback over another (and only three types of feedback were studied here), in the end I wind up asking myself, "So what?" — especially when the definition of "uptake" means merely attempting to correct a mistake when the computer is telling you, 'Hey, you made mistake.'
Personally, I wanted to see what kind of long-term uptake occurred, but that was not of immediate interest to the researcher. I also kept asking myself what the value of being told 'you made a mistake with the past participle' is when students aren't asked to do anything further with that mistake other than type in something else and have the computer check the answer. Sure, it beats what is possible in a workbook, but I'm skeptical of how much real uptake is happening here. I would have much preferred to see how this kind of explicit feedback stacks up against an implicit variety where students have to judge whether the meaning of what they've said/written is interpreted by a 'listener' as what they meant to say. Hey, wait a minute: that sounds an awful lot like what I've been tinkering with myself... I just have little faith that rewriting a word because you've been told the form is wrong leads to anything substantial in the way of SLA. I may be wrong.
Should we read this for class? Probably not. It was good for me and what I'm studying, but it doesn't have a lot of class-wide appeal, I'm guessing.
Evaluation of Todd (2001) by BoSun
Todd, R. (2001). Induction from self-selected concordances and self-correction. System, 29, 91-102
This research investigates whether university-level L2 learners of English are able to induce patterns of target words using concordance and self-correct their errors in writing based on their induction. The two key terms, induction and self-correction are defined as the ability to generate rules or patterns based on the examples including target words (induction) and learners’ ability to apply induced patters in self-correction (self-correction). The research question is whether the learners can induce rules using concordance and use the rule induced to self-correction their errors in writing. Procedures are as follows; after lexical items causing errors in writing were identified, the students self-created 23 concordances of the lexical items, induced patterns from the data and are asked to apply the rules in self-correction of their errors. The participants were generally able to induce valid patterns from their own concordance and make valid self-correction. There was a strong correlation between induction and self-correction, meaning that induction and self-correction are likely to occur together. It is also revealed that induction and self-correction are possibly affected by several factors such as the part of speech of the lexical items, effects of number of parts of speech, the number of patterns of usage, the number of meanings.
It is somewhat useful to read this article since it gives couple of ideas for further study. First, it is necessary to do further study whether induction leads to self-correction. This study found a strong correlation between induction and self-correction; however, a strong correlation between the two abilities does not necessarily mean induction of rules causes self-correction. Second, it would be another research topic for further study to investigate the effects of several factors (e.g. the part of speech of the lexical items) that has significant correlation with inducement and self-correction in this study. Again, this article reported a correlation between the factors and inducement and self-correction, therefore whether such factors actually affect inducement and self-correction needs to be investigated in future study. Last, it would worth examining which of these factors has greater effect than the other on induction and self-correction.
I personally enjoyed reading this article very much. The concepts of induction and self-correction are very attractive since these abilities enable L2 learners to be autonomous. These concepts are also interesting in a sense that it sheds light on how incorporation of technology leads to learner autonomy. However, I was a bit confused when the author mentioned inducement as a prerequisite for self-correction and the factors affecting inducement and self-correction since it seems that he misinterpreted correlation as cause and effect.
My conclusion is that I do recommend this article to be added to the reading packet. Above all, studies about concordance seem to be rare in the literature, and it would add a new perspective for self-feedback and computer mediated feedback with further studies, e.g. inducement as a process of self-feedback.
This research investigates whether university-level L2 learners of English are able to induce patterns of target words using concordance and self-correct their errors in writing based on their induction. The two key terms, induction and self-correction are defined as the ability to generate rules or patterns based on the examples including target words (induction) and learners’ ability to apply induced patters in self-correction (self-correction). The research question is whether the learners can induce rules using concordance and use the rule induced to self-correction their errors in writing. Procedures are as follows; after lexical items causing errors in writing were identified, the students self-created 23 concordances of the lexical items, induced patterns from the data and are asked to apply the rules in self-correction of their errors. The participants were generally able to induce valid patterns from their own concordance and make valid self-correction. There was a strong correlation between induction and self-correction, meaning that induction and self-correction are likely to occur together. It is also revealed that induction and self-correction are possibly affected by several factors such as the part of speech of the lexical items, effects of number of parts of speech, the number of patterns of usage, the number of meanings.
It is somewhat useful to read this article since it gives couple of ideas for further study. First, it is necessary to do further study whether induction leads to self-correction. This study found a strong correlation between induction and self-correction; however, a strong correlation between the two abilities does not necessarily mean induction of rules causes self-correction. Second, it would be another research topic for further study to investigate the effects of several factors (e.g. the part of speech of the lexical items) that has significant correlation with inducement and self-correction in this study. Again, this article reported a correlation between the factors and inducement and self-correction, therefore whether such factors actually affect inducement and self-correction needs to be investigated in future study. Last, it would worth examining which of these factors has greater effect than the other on induction and self-correction.
I personally enjoyed reading this article very much. The concepts of induction and self-correction are very attractive since these abilities enable L2 learners to be autonomous. These concepts are also interesting in a sense that it sheds light on how incorporation of technology leads to learner autonomy. However, I was a bit confused when the author mentioned inducement as a prerequisite for self-correction and the factors affecting inducement and self-correction since it seems that he misinterpreted correlation as cause and effect.
My conclusion is that I do recommend this article to be added to the reading packet. Above all, studies about concordance seem to be rare in the literature, and it would add a new perspective for self-feedback and computer mediated feedback with further studies, e.g. inducement as a process of self-feedback.
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